The pain of modern art

I was enjoying a quiet game of Scrabble with Dad at my parents' house this week when I was stricken with vomiting and a pain in my chest that made it almost impossible to breathe. Eventually, an ambulance took me to Lewisham hospital to discern, after six hours of agony and hyperventilation, that I had trapped wind. More as a sop to respectability than a palliative, I think, they gave me a syringeful of what was basically liquid Kwells and sent me on my way.

Looking back on those six hours, I cannot help but notice that not once did I call for some modern art. Not for the giant £70,000 pebble by sculptor John Aiken purchased by UCL last year or anything acquired by NHS South West during a recent £400,000 spending spree. It turns out that when you are ill, frightened, or in pain - even if it does slightly anticlimactically turn out to be the result of thwarted burping - your mental vista shrinks to a tiny window obscured by a heavy scrawl saying "Where is a doctor who can take away my illness, fright or pain, and could I have him soon, please? (PS While I am aware that men and women are doctors and unquestionably equally adept in the job, I am in sufficient distress not to bother with politically correct double pronouns.)"

I try to greet the bubbles that often rise to the surface of this world of boiling insanity with equanimity. But there is something about the existence not just of people willing to pay this sort of money but of enough of them to form the committees, sign off on the infinite mass of paperwork the NHS purchase of anything bigger than a Biro generates, and then face down the patients who stare in dismay at the aesthetically pleasing but medically useless object before them.

I always want to ask - did nobody, nobody at all in the long chain of decision-makers that must surely stretch out behind the existence of this cripplingly expensive rock ever think to stop and ask whether there was not some way that this cash, or the energies - the well-intentioned though hopelessly misguided energies - that went into raising it could have been diverted into researching the causes of leukaemia, say, or into raising awareness of the fact that the NHS is about to break under the strain of imbecilities like this?

Of course, my reaction is aggravated by the fact that I have a plebeian, simplistic and - oh, what's the word - yes, normal take on modern art. Namely, that anything that requires you to take a chainsaw to a carcass, piss into a mould or build a giant slide might be a valuable asset when you are attempting to stage the kind of stag weekend that will live in the minds of later Nuts generations fulfils only half of the brief.

It's modern, but if you're not painting misty lilies and bridges in dots (rather than arranging them in geometric patterns like overpriced Twister games) or sculpting entwined human forms that bring forth eternal passions out of a solid block of marble, it's not art. Although this is hardly as important when it's sitting outside a hospital, at the price of a departmental research head, as the fact that it's not science.

On Halloween various children rang the bell, to whom I distributed vividly hued pellets of sugar and E numbers with a liberal hand. Then a lad of about 11 turned up - no costume, no mask, no make-up. "Trick or treat?" he said. "But you've not dressed up," I pointed out. "No," he said equably.

"I thought you could use your imagination." I gave him a fiver. Next year he'll probably be my MP.